How Michele Kang became one of the biggest investors in women’s soccer

In a Parisian café, amid the excitement of the Summer Olympics, businesswoman Michele Kang sat down for breakfast with U.S. Soccer CEO J.T. Batson. The two were scheduled to meet for an hour between the U.S. women’s national team’s semifinal win and its eventual gold medal victory over Brazil. While they had met before, they had never spoken at length.

Three hours later, the two were still there, not just talking, but in the weeds on big, foundational ideas around the women’s program. When they finally parted ways, they left with the seed of an idea that would eventually turn into the second-largest donation U.S. Soccer has received.

On Tuesday, U.S. Soccer announced Kang — majority owner of the Washington Spirit, Olympique Lyonnais Féminin and London City Lionesses under her global multi-club organization Kynisca — was donating $30million (£24m). The funds are earmarked over the next five years for women’s youth national team camps, talent identification and scouting, and female coach and referee education and mentorship.

GO DEEPER

Spirit owner Kang pledges $30million into women’s soccer programs

“I had a lot of coffee,” Kang deadpanned when asked about that Paris breakfast during an interview following Tuesday’s press conference in New York City.

“Michele started asking really good, insightful questions on things and ultimately got to some core issues,” Batson told The Athletic. Kang wanted to know how U.S. Soccer was thinking at a federation-wide level and Batson walked her through the long-term vision, even if that vision didn’t have secured funding and resources attached yet.

Kang and Batson chat after announcing Kang’s $30million donation (Mike Lawrence / Getty Images)

These questions had been on Kang’s mind for years since she gained majority ownership of the Spirit in 2022. She knew the NWSL would need more coaches and more referees with expansion and more games. She could see the lack of technical staff at the youth levels around D.C., too.

“While the professional league and professional teams’ trajectory and investments are great, it could be really temporary if we don’t have all these underlying foundational blocks,” she said. It wasn’t just the investment that needed to happen, it was attention — but that wasn’t on her alone or the NWSL. When the breakfast meeting in Paris happened, Kang had finally found an avenue for those ambitions.

“We geeked out for a few hours on what the mission-critical, core-enabling functions that we’re going to need for soccer in this country, and women’s soccer in particular, to be the best in the world,” Batson continued. “And everything led from there.”

While Tuesday’s announcement earned its fair share of attention, the eye-popping investment is to be used in areas of U.S. Soccer that don’t get a lot of shine and certainly won’t get a lot of headlines over the next five years as the work is carried out. That was a motivation for Kang in many ways — this isn’t for splashy projects, such as the national training center.

“It is equally — potentially more — critical that we have all the systems in place. Because if you don’t have the coaches, if you don’t have the referees, it just doesn’t work,” she said. “That’s why I felt it was important that not only I personally believe in it, but I wanted to bring attention to these issues, hoping that more people will join in and invest in it.”

Kang is not one to accept things as final.

“I hate following any convention if they say, ‘You’re not supposed to do it.’ I always asked why it wasn’t acceptable. So unless I understood the rationale, I wouldn’t do it,” she told The Athletic in an interview conducted in May 2022, shortly after she became the majority owner of the Washington Spirit. “So in that society where young people, especially kids, are supposed to follow the rules, I was a problem child.”

Growing up as the youngest of three girls in South Korea, Kang was more curious than rebellious, always asking why. Her mother was called to her school multiple times, not because Kang was causing trouble — she was a top student — but because she would question teachers, rules and expectations.

Kang’s parents had been waiting for a boy who could carry the family name. She arrived instead. She has credited her father for instilling a sense of equality and possibility in her from the beginning. He was a professor, one of the first Koreans after the Second World War who earned a U.S. government scholarship to study in America, which also meant he didn’t serve in the Korean War.

Kang was a self-described tomboy growing up. She played sports, a lot of them. Basketball was her favorite. In elementary school, she was the second tallest kid in her class.

“I was going to be a basketball player, but I found out there was somebody the same age as me who played basketball in another school. She was already 6ft 2in and I said, ‘Well, I’m never going to be number one, forget it,’” Kang recalled.

She played soccer and volleyball, but tennis became her primary sport before the need to study won out.

After growing up in South Korea, Kang moved to the U.S. to attend college (Hannah Foslien / Imagn Images)

Kang planned to earn her college degree at home. While her father had studied abroad in America, her parents wanted her to graduate from a Korean college to help preserve her cultural identity. She started at a co-ed college of economics, but she was the only woman enrolled.

Things in South Korea were also tumultuous at the time.

President Park Chung-hee was assassinated in 1979, followed by a coup led by General Chun Doo-hwan. Chun arrested his political opponents and limited political opposition. Martial law was put in place and student-led protests were violently suppressed.

“The country was in turmoil. Campuses were shut down because typically, students were at the forefront of the demonstrations,” she said. Her parents were worried that if Kang was involved in those demonstrations, or arrested, it would be the end of her life as she knew it.

So she devised a plan. Her parents would eventually be responsible for a dowry if she married. Instead, she told them, “When I get married, you don’t need to spend a dime. Just give me a fraction of that money so that I can pay my tuition, just one year, as a college student.”

While she believed her parents would have usually said no — they had to borrow money to pay for that year of tuition — the worry over her future amid the demonstrations and dangerous political unrest got her a yes.

“I guess you could say that was my first business deal,” she said with a smile.

When she got to the University of Chicago in 1981, she thrived. She turned one year into two, working in the summer as a waitress and adding a second job at the library once the semester rolled around.

“There was a sitcom, ‘Cheers,’” she said. “The song, ‘You want to go where everybody knows your name’ — I wanted to go where no one knew my name because of where I grew up. With my father as a professor, I was always so and so’s daughter, so and so’s granddaughter. I absolutely hated it. I really wanted to go somewhere where no one knew who I was. If I fail, I fail, but at least it’s going to be on me as opposed to getting any special treatment.”

She loved the school, loved the feel of the campus and the quad that reminded her of Oxford University. She would walk back and forth, believing she’d get smarter by absorbing the energy of the place.

Kang speaks on a panel at the Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit 2024 (Presley Ann / Getty Images)

She went to graduate school at Yale School of Management. Coming out of her MBA, Kang said she had three 10-year plans. In the first 10, she wanted to go into consulting because the project-based nature of the work appealed to her. One day it would be supply chains, the next branding, the day after that telecommunications or manufacturing. She wanted to learn how every element of a business works. The next 10 years, even though she hated the concept, she would go to a Fortune 500 company to learn the organizational part of being in the business world and to acquire leadership skills.

“At the end of the day, business is not about how smart you are, how many functional capabilities or the expertise you have, it’s about organization,” Kang said. “How do you get people below you, sideways from you, above you, how do you get them to do what you need them to do? How can you get them to work with you to accomplish common goals?”

And in the third decade, she was going to become a Fortune 500 CEO.

“That’s also why I left Korea, right?” Kang said. “I could have gotten my business career going, but I wanted to try in a bigger pond.”

In the end, instead of becoming a CEO, she started her own company, Cognoscente — a healthcare technology company — in 2008. She effectively did what she set out to do, even if she didn’t nail her own timeline.

Kang had a plan for the fourth decade, too: giving back and public service. And in 2019, she found women’s soccer.

After the U.S. won the 2019 Women’s World Cup, while also fighting for equal pay, there was a reception for the team on Capitol Hill. Tom Daschle, the former Democratic senator from South Dakota, who also served on the Cognoscente board, invited Kang. Daschle would eventually join the Spirit investor group a couple of years later, under the team’s previous ownership.

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t know there was a professional league in this country,” Kang told The Athletic in 2022. “In part because my life had been all about work. I didn’t have time to do anything else.”

She met Steve Baldwin, then the majority owner of the Spirit, at the reception, along with players and fellow potential investors. By December 2020, she joined as a minority investor with a 35 percent stake in the team. The soccer part was nice, but what appealed to her most was having a hands-on impact on women’s empowerment, especially around pay and equity issues.

Kang celebrated the Spirit’s 2021 championship with the team (Tim Nwachukwu/ Getty Images)

Four things had helped her through her journey, she said: “Dignity of work, dignity of self, independence and being able to get the same opportunity.”

With women’s soccer, she could provide opportunities.

But the path to becoming the first woman of color to own a majority stake in the NWSL was not straightforward. In 2021, negotiations for her to gain a controlling stake of the Spirit turned sour between her, Baldwin, and the other primary investor, Bill Lynch. When she made a $35million offer to buy the Spirit in December of that year, it was unheard of for the league. The expansion fee for the Kansas City Current had been a mere $5million; the sale of the majority stake of the Seattle Reign to Lyon in 2019 had been completed at a valuation of $3.51million.

Those numbers seem quaint now, but the astronomical rise in NWSL team valuations wouldn’t have happened in the same way without that first $35million offer from Kang.

Over the past couple of years, her international ambitions came to fruition via a global multi-club organization. It started with a majority stake in Lyon’s women’s team, one of the best European club teams with regular Champions League appearances. Then she snapped up one of the few independent clubs in the top two flights of the English soccer pyramid, the London City Lionesses.

The formal announcement of the multi-club organization came this summer, with Kynisca announcing its name and an “innovation hub” focused on the health and performance of women athletes, billed to be the largest of its kind.

Kang, via Kynisca, also led a $2million investment in Ida Sports, which designs cleats and shoes for female players, and invested in media company Just Women’s Sports. She also joined the investor group that bought the Baltimore Orioles earlier this year at a $1.725billion valuation.

Kang has also branched into other women’s sports with another deal that happened at the Paris Olympics, donating $4million over the next four years to USA Rugby to support the women’s sevens team leading into the 2028 Olympics. USA Rugby called her donation “transformative.”

That deal came together even faster than the one with U.S. Soccer. Kang walked into the sold-out Stade de France, surprised by the atmosphere. She ended up next to the chair of USA Rugby and they struck up a conversation.

“It was literally the most expensive game I’ve ever been to,” Kang joked Tuesday. “I really did not expect to do that. But I just felt that (the team is) so talented that they should not be deprived of investment and just like what I’ve been trying to do in my own small way, bring attention and hope people begin to see it, and more people will join.”

That’s the way Kang usually talks about her larger projects: as some small way of changing the game. But for all the praise she gets, there are still skeptics of her motives and her methods — especially the multi-club model.

She’s addressed at least one of those critiques head-on.

“I am fully aware of the negative connotation of multi-club (ownership), especially on the men’s side,” Kang said following her purchase of London City. “I will submit to you that on the women’s side, multi-club is a necessity, not luxury or greed. Because we need to invest to professionalize women’s football to the level that they deserve and the potential that women’s football has. We need to invest. Because of the lack of media dollars, there isn’t that much money to invest.”

After Tuesday’s $30million announcement, it’s harder for critics to accuse Kang of acting in bad faith. Still, she has the edge of ruthlessness regarding business; she wants to make money at this. It’s never been a charity. Instead, she saw an opening and was among the first to leap.

She also knows there are risks. Kang doesn’t believe in guaranteed outcomes, just opportunities.

“This is a tipping point. Once it happens, it’s on its own trajectory. You can’t stop it,” she said Tuesday. “But we have to make sure we’re investing in the right things at the right time. Otherwise, this could fall apart.”

One of those investments is doing just fine. After going to New York City to announce her U.S. Soccer donation, Kang headed to Kansas City to watch her first team, the Spirit, vie for the NWSL championship against the top-seeded Orlando Pride on Saturday night.

She’s feeling the nerves, especially after two late winning goals in the playoffs at a sold-out Audi Field.

“I kept telling the players after the quarterfinal and the semifinal that at this rate, I don’t think I’m going to live out my natural life span,” Kang said laughing. “I only have one heart.”

Pablo Maurer contributed to this report.

(Top photo: Mike Lawrence / Getty Images)